Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

By : Lentin Joseph
Book Image

Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming

By: Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

The area of robotics is gaining huge momentum among corporate people, researchers, hobbyists, and students. The major challenge in robotics is its controlling software. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a modular software platform to develop generic robotic applications. This book discusses the advanced concepts in robotics and how to program using ROS. It starts with deep overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS really works. During the course of the book, you will learn how to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. After discussing robot manipulation and navigation in robots, you will get to grips with the interfacing I/O boards, sensors, and actuators of ROS. One of the essential ingredients of robots are vision sensors, and an entire chapter is dedicated to the vision sensor, its interfacing in ROS, and its programming. You will discuss the hardware interfacing and simulation of complex robot to ROS and ROS Industrial (Package used for interfacing industrial robots). Finally, you will get to know the best practices to follow when programming using ROS.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding Dynamixel ROS Servo controllers for robot hardware interfacing


Till now, we have learned about MoveIt! interfacing using Gazebo simulation. In this section, we will see how to replace Gazebo and put a real robot interface to MoveIt!. Let's discuss the Dynamixel Servos and the ROS controllers.

The Dynamixel Servos

The Dynamixel Servos are smart, high performance networked actuators for high end robotics applications. These servos are manufactured by a Korean company called ROBOTIS (http://en.robotis.com/). These servos are very popular among robotics enthusiasts because they can provide excellent position and torque control, and also provide variety of feedback, such as position, speed, temperature, voltage, and so on.

One of their useful features is that they can be networked as a daisy chain manner. This feature is very useful in multijoint systems such as a robotic arm, humanoid robots, robotic snakes, and such others.

The servos can be directly connected to PCs using a USB...